Web searching puts a great deal of information at the fingertips of anyone who can connect to the Internet with a computing device. A keyword search can instantly return thousands of web pages relevant to the search terms. Still, there is much room for improvement in how to perform good web searches and in how to best display the results, especially when the results are numerous.
When a web search results in a large number of “hits,” then various techniques are needed to display the matches, since the practical display capability of a computer monitor is limited. The ability of a human to sift through thousands of hits is also limited. When there are numerous good matches, then the question becomes which web pages should be given priority in the listing of search results. Conventional web page rankers currently used to assign priority to search results use a common metric of how many other web pages link to the page being ranked. The number of linked web pages is readily available and built into the fabric of the Internet. Whereas this metric may give some indication of a web page's value, it is only a rough guide because the reason for many links from other web pages may be irrelevant to the search at hand. Additionally, it is possible to exploit the property of being a well-linked web page. To increase the likelihood of a web page appearing in a search, a web site owner can create many dummy sites to link the page to be boosted in search results.
More apt criteria for ranking search results in a satisfying manner are needed. That is, more ways are needed to anticipate what a human searcher would enjoy seeing first in a listing of search results.